Unregrettably
by TheVelvetDusk
Summary: "Their one perfect night together felt like a foregone conclusion, an event that was as close to fated as she allowed herself to believe in these days." {a progression of lyatt moments, canon through 2x05, no future spoilers}


_a/n: so this rambling oneshot was originally born of a prompt from PeachCheetah, and while I'm sure the original request was meant to be a thousand times fluffier than what I created, I do promise that this does eventually become a happily ever after scenario for our fave fictional idiots in love :) That said, the angst of the current arc refused to be left out of the equation, so this does include canon through 2x05 and has no spoilers for anything beyond then - just my version of events, nothing more!_

 _Andddd the hilariously brilliant line of dialogue suggested from PeachCheetah that launched it all: "Does your claustrophobia mean you need to be on top?"_

* * *

"I have no regrets."

Lucy heard it over and over again in her head, night after lonely night. His voice had dipped low when he'd said, marked with enough emotion to turn her inside out, reminding her all too much of the exact non-regret he'd been referencing… because his voice _that night_ , rumbling over her skin, murmuring the word "beautiful" right on the heels of her first climax, had been so full of the same sincerity.

She'd been more nervous to sleep with Wyatt than anyone who'd come before him, save for her first. More nervous, she realized in hindsight, because of how much was on the line. Her heart was invested in ways she'd never experienced before, so many feelings twisting up into her throat as she tried to breathe through each firelit kiss. It was then that she discovered he had the ability to leave her breathless in more ways that one, and that breathlessness - loss of control, _abandon_ \- was not always such a bad thing. He was somehow both the scariest and safest man she'd ever been with, a confusing dichotomy that only made sense when she looked into his eyes.

In the end, there was no question about what had happened that night in 1941. She'd trusted him with so much of herself already. How could she have resisted giving him that one last piece of her too? Their one perfect night together felt like a foregone conclusion, an event that was as close to _fated_ as she allowed herself to believe in these days.

 _No regrets._ Should she have said that? Should she have so easily agreed with him? Was it true that she stood by her decision to sleep with him, even now...even when she'd lost him to his own wife?

She wasn't so sure she'd meant it. And maybe that meant she'd lied to him. _Again_. The deceit was beginning to add up as fast as the heartbreak.

With her head hidden in her pillow, a new shuffle of living arrangements that had left her without a roommate, and no company but the perpetual clank of whatever the hell echoed all night long in the bunker walls, Lucy breathed a shaky sigh and let the tears fall.

Not for the first time, she dreamt vividly of Hedy Lamarr's guesthouse as soon as sleep sunk its dulled teeth into her.

* * *

Wyatt was the first to slam on the brakes when their bodies began to unravel together several weeks later, free at last to act on their feelings without pretense, but it couldn't be as simple as that anymore, could it?

They'd been sharing a drink - a bottle of bourbon he'd smuggled from a century that wasn't their own - and sitting in godawful silence, because the wife that no longer kept them apart might as well have been wedged right there between them on that paper-thin mattress, a tangible barricade that he felt in every nuance of Lucy's guarded body language.

And then it had happened without warning. They'd both been drinking too quickly, and the haze in his own head spoke volumes about what it had to be doing to _her_ , but even then he hadn't expected anything meaningful to kindle between them. His offer to share the bottle had been perfectly innocent. What was a little harmless post-mission decompressing between… Teammates? Friends? Could they be considered exes if their relationship had lasted less than 24 hours?

Whatever they were labeling themselves nowadays, 'innocent' was certainly no longer in their vocabulary.

He hadn't been able to tear his eyes away from her as she tipped the bottle back and covered it with her lips. She passed it back to him and watched him do the same, over and over again, a malicious unspoken pattern that circled around them until their lips abandoned the bottle and they started drinking from each other instead.

This was a long way off from the night they'd shared in Hollywood. There had been no discussion, no lead in, no reverence for the monumental landmark of what this could mean. Each kiss was increasingly tainted with melancholy, rough and impulsive and _too soon_. The bitter sting of alcohol on her tongue tasted like a blasphemous betrayal to everything they'd once had together.

He broke away with a big gulping breath, unable to stomach another minute of what could only cause them more hurt in the end. "Is this - this shouldn't...I - "

Lucy stiffened, pushing against his shoulders hard enough to leave him physically unbalanced. _More_ physically unbalanced. Her mouth parted but words didn't come. And then she sprang up from her narrow bed and took off for the door.

"Lucy, wait!" He nearly face-planted in his haste to get between her and the exit. "Wait, please - "

She froze with a hand pressed to the door, but her back stayed to him, shoulders quaking. "Let's just forget it, okay?"

Wyatt's heart sank at the possibility that the 'it' she was electing to forget was meant to encompass all that they were; labeled and unlabeled, past and present, all of it.

"I could never forget it," he answered softly. "And I wouldn't want to anyway."

Her body sagged forward into the door. "Me neither. But sometimes I wish I could."

He couldn't blame her for that. He couldn't blame her for anything. _They_ might not be innocent, but on her own, Lucy was as blameless and incorruptible as they came...he was the one who'd contaminated her from the start, not the other way around.

"I'll go," he whispered after another long beat of silence. "It's your room."

She nodded but didn't move away from the door. Didn't turn to face him.

"Lucy?"

"Leave the bottle."

She'd already had too much, but he was incapable of judging. "Okay."

Her face was pointedly turned away from him as she slipped sideways to let him through. Wyatt slid his fingertips over her arm on his way out, his voice nothing but a gravelly rustle. "If we ever...if we do _this_ , I - I need to be sure it's really what you want...that you won't hate me for it as soon as it's over."

Without another word from her, he had no option but to go.

He swore he felt her breath on his face every time he tried to close his eyes that night.

* * *

They were stuck in the past. Just the two of them. A probable recipe for disaster...well, a recipe for _something_ , and there were still days where she felt like there was nothing between them but disaster anymore.

Surely the Lifeboat would be back again by the end of the day. That's what she kept telling herself. They had to return eventually. The only catch was that someone needed to come and collect them from this depressing dustbowl of a town before she and Wyatt could tear each other to pieces, or else there might not be anything left to retrieve.

But the hours melted on and on until the sky burned with a glorious orange-tinged sunset, and there was still no sign of a single familiar face from 2018.

The local saloon served up a tasteless dinner. Lucy nearly choked on the awful excuse for beer that was meant to wash it down. Even Wyatt grimaced at the taste of it, a brief glimpse into some version of him that was capable of expressing something other than anger.

They delayed talking about their next step until it was almost too late to do anything about their lamentable fate.

"So what'll it be, Lucy?" he asked with a mock-smile that did nothing to disguise his rankled irritation. "The inn above this place? Or the one across the street? What are your history senses telling you?"

Lucy crumpled her gloves into two tightly clenched fists. He was still mad at her for following a dodgy lead on her own, for impulsively flying blind without him and getting herself into a scary tangle with the sleeper agent, which ultimately was what had landed them in this situation, stranded and exhausted and pissed off.

"My history senses are telling me that you're being an ass."

To her surprise, his mouth actually curled up to one side with a small noise of concession. He was getting up in another moment, and from her seat at the table for two, she could hear him talking to the woman behind the counter about getting a room for the night with his wife.

She cringed involuntarily. Even as a meaningless cover story, that word still caught painfully along her rib cage.

Lucy did all she could to numb herself as they were escorted to their room. Nothing was going to happen. Nothing. He hadn't so much as touched her - desperate rescue missions and the occasional bump of his knees from across the Lifeboat excluded - since that bourbon-infused night at the bunker. _Nothing was going to happen_.

But then her frustration with what felt like thirty pounds of heavy brocade caught his attention and she knew then that it was over. He drifted nearer, his words deceptively light. "Let me help."

It took him several minutes to get through multiple layers of corsets and petticoats, and by the time she felt the last of the outer garments giving way beneath his fingers, Wyatt's breath was audibly shallow from behind her. He'd been so consistently gentle, so damn meticulous, that she'd almost imagined he wasn't quite as affected by the intimacy of it as she was...but that recurring hitch of an inhale gave him away.

Now that she was down to nothing but a white ruffled slip, she moved to step up and over the fortress of discarded fabric and his hands closed over her arms, steadying her until she'd safely extricated herself. His hold on her went lax then, allowing her all the freedom she needed to also safely extricate herself from _him_ if that was what she wanted, but she didn't take the opening.

Lucy turned slowly, feeling a tremor run through him as he turned his face down to study the floor. "Wyatt…"

He shook his head, throat bobbing.

"Wyatt, look at me."

He didn't listen to her until her hand was scraping over the thickening stubble along his jaw. It wasn't so much of a choice then as it was a reflex. There they were, those startling blue windows to a soul she knew too well. A soul she couldn't seem to separate herself from no matter how hard she tried.

He was blinking back a rapid onset of tears. "I don't deserve this. I...I'm - "

"What about what I deserve?" Lucy protested with more certainty than she'd known in quite some time.

His already ragged breathing quickened yet again. "What?"

"I know what I want. I'm not drunk and I'm not confused. There's no chance that I'll want to take this back." She closed her eyes, her body aching with the memory of what it felt like to be filled with his. "Do we both have to punish ourselves forever?"

"Lucy…"

There it was - the voice that was too low and too sincere, overflowing with emotion, a direct cannonball to everything that her heart had been holding so closely inside. _No regrets_.

With her hand still cemented to his jaw, she kissed him. She kissed him and kissed him and kissed him. Couldn't stop kissing him.

But then he fell back by a half step and the earth threatened to swallow her whole.

"Hey, no," he murmured with a hand to her neck, "it's not that. I just - I need to catch up, okay?"

He gestured impatiently at his three piece suit and the potent relief of what he meant almost had her knees giving out from under her. "Oh, okay."

Wyatt's teary-eyed smirk of understanding gave her that last push - she couldn't stay upright. She sank backward onto the edge of the bed, a rush of blood surging through her veins as he peeled away his jacket, his vest, his tie.

She'd regained her head just enough to stop him as he moved to the top button of his dress shirt. Her hand wrapped around one of his and tugged him nearer. "Let me help."

He came willingly, smiling softly at the reversal in roles.

Lucy gnawed at her lip to keep herself calm. The heat of his skin blazed through the thin shirt from the first moment of contact, and she could feel the eager jump of his muscles beneath her hands as she skimmed from one button to the next.

"Permission to start on my belt buckle, ma'am?" he asked tightly.

She pretended to consider before giving a sharp shake of her head. "Permission denied."

He was laughing and groaning all at once, finally erasing the last trace of lingering agony from his expression. "God, I love you."

Her hands fell from away from him in a heartbeat. "What?"

Wyatt knelt before her, his hands searching over her face, her neck, her shoulders. "I love you. You're so brave sometimes that it terrifies me, but I never have to doubt that you know what you're doing, not even when you have me scared shitless. You make me laugh. You're the best person I know. The strongest. The smartest. You have so much heart. Of course I love you, Lucy."

She was crying and shaking and fighting for a response, but no matter how many times she tried to clear her throat, words would not come.

He flicked the last two buttons open and shrugged out of his shirt, then captured both of her hands. "Tell me to stop and we stop - immediately, at any point, no questions asked. Got it?"

Lucy nodded with a wobbling exhale.

"The belt is yours whenever you're ready."

Now. She was ready now. She wanted to fall into him all over again, even if it meant risking her heart on someone who had broken it once already. He was still the scariest choice, the safest choice...her only choice.

She undid his belt with trembling fingers. Wyatt moved her backwards as soon as his pants were kicked off to the floor, guiding her by the hips and crawling over her until her shoulders tumbled into the awaiting pillows.

He sought out her eyes with a deliberate grin. "Wait, so… Does your claustrophobia mean you need to be on top?"

Her waterlogged laugh came unbidden. She thumped a hand against his chest but couldn't keep herself from grinning back at him. "Like you don't already know the answer to that."

"Thought it was worth checking," he murmured as his lips mapped their way slowly over her neck, pausing here and there for a prolonged caress, "just trying to be considerate…"

"Is that your roundabout way of confessing that you forgot who was on top before?"

His face floated up to hers in a split-second, the joke evaporating from his eyes. "Impossible."

"Wyatt, I was - "

He never let her get around to saying the word 'kidding.'

His lips struck a flame against hers, igniting the latent desire that had been simmering just below the surface for weeks now. There were more tears on her cheeks, some from her eyes, some from his, but nothing - not even their residual heartache of too much time spent denying the inevitable - could extinguish the fire between them.

* * *

He'd relived that morning in the hills of Hollywood more times than any sane man should admit to, especially after said sane man had unexpectedly found himself reunited with his lost wife and had no business hearing the serene "good morning" of another woman playing through his head in all of his favorite dreams.

Not that he'd considered himself to be overwhelmingly sane in quite some time now.

But finally - _finally_ \- he was in that place again, warm and happy and centered by the balance that Lucy alone could bring to his life. She was already awake, shifting against him just as she did in those dreams, causing his mind to go tiptoeing along the brink of consciousness, awaiting the touch of her hand on his skin to bring him the rest of the way home to her.

That touch never came. Her body was shifting in the wrong direction, retreating instead of coming nearer.

A tiny, subdued sniffle ripped him into full alertness.

"Lucy?" His vision was blurred and unreliable, but her tepid smile broke through to him in an instant. "Hey, what's...what's wrong?"

He had to force the end of that question, because surely...surely her answer would invite the worst of his guilt-ridden shame, leveling him to nothing but dust and ashes.

"Nothing."

"You're crying," he croaked out roughly. "That's not nothing."

She shook her head and edged just the slightest bit closer to his side. "It is, though. I - I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm _happy_ , Wyatt, so incredibly happy, I swear to you I am..."

He opened his arms to her and felt some of the terror fizzle out of him when she automatically rolled into his chest. "You can tell me, Lucy. Whatever it is, you can tell me, I promise."

She did nothing but breathe against him for the longest time.

"I...I thought last night would take it away for good, I guess."

"Take what away?" he murmured into her hair.

"That last little piece of me that still feels like - like it was a little too easy to find myself on the backburner until you - until..."

Wyatt tightened his hold on her, wishing he could wage a physical battle with these demons that tormented her; demons of his own making, the very ones he'd foolishly unleashed upon her while fumbling through the worst of his own indecision.

He waited until he was sure she wasn't continuing. With a hand tipping her chin up and his eyes fastened to hers, he scoured his brain for the right way to begin. But no, in a bout of anything but eloquence, he had to pop off with the first stupid thing that made any sense to him. "I've seen you try to cook, Lucy, so if we're going with kitchen metaphors, you'll have to bear with me for a minute here."

One eyebrow flew high on her forehead. "I'm...listening."

Thank God for small - or perhaps immense - favors.

"There was nothing easy about - well, about anything that's happened since '41, but _especially_ anything related to my feelings for you," he began carefully. "And yeah, maybe I tried to relegate you to the so-called backburner until I could figure things out with my marriage, but I failed. _Miserably_. Like blinding steam pouring in every possible direction, water boiling over and splattering across the range, setting off every damn smoke alarm in the house, almost burning the whole place to the ground kind of failure. An utter disaster."

She sniffled again, but it came with a small smile. "We're in luck. Cooking-gone-wrong is the only kind of cooking I can relate to, and even then…"

"Yeah?" he prompted gently.

"Well… It's more likely that I'd be reheating takeout in the microwave only to have it end in a huge mess of exploded egg drop soup...with maybe a little melted plastic stuck to the spinning plate if I'm really feeling destructive that day."

"Okay, _that_ …" Wyatt responded with a chuckle, "let's go with that. My feelings for you are an explosion of melted plastic and egg drop soup, okay? A big uncontainable mess that refuses to be ignored. I know that doesn't make it any better, but - "

"It does," she hummed in a soft voice, cuddling closer with a hand searching over his chest. "Sorry for freaking out on you this morning."

That triggered an instantaneous frown. "You've earned a few thousand freak-outs by now, Lucy. If anyone should be apologizing, it's - "

"You have." She twisted in his arms and pushed herself up to look him squarely in the eyes. "So many times. No more."

Heat surged into her gaze as she recognized the inherent proximity of their naked bodies, her expression darkening with each passing second she suspended herself over him. She made quite the enticing portrait, all mussed-up hair and ivory skin, a beacon of everything he wanted.

Wyatt reached up to push a dark lock of her hair back from her face, nestling his hand into the nape of her neck. "You told me last night that there was no way you'd want to take this back."

"And I was right." She dipped down to tease her lips across his. "No regrets, sweetheart."

"No regrets, babydoll," he whispered back, a smile broadening further and further over his face until he was sure he'd run out of room to smile any wider.

Lucy snuck a leg across his hip to straddle him properly before making good on that wisp of a kiss, and in the luster of a sunny post-coital haze, Wyatt found himself musing that it wouldn't be so bad if her claustrophobia demanded such things more often.

* * *

She was beginning to have her doubts about whether or not this was such a great idea.

Lucy didn't function like a normal person anymore. Her beloved planner had been obsolete for what had nearly closed in on three long years. She'd traded department meetings for classified strategy sessions, pantsuits for hoop skirts, PowerPoint presentations for face-to-face encounters with the most influential men and women of American history. She'd become an outsider in her own field, and with no desire to return to her mother's old department at Stanford, she couldn't even rely on the strength of old contacts now that she'd uprooted to a smaller private college several miles down the coast.

Her eyes were strained with too much time spent underground. She fought to keep her panicked breathing under control when she got swept up in the commotion of a busy hallway between classes, her ears ringing with the centuries-old echo of a riotous mob. Her first lecture on Lincoln's assassination brought her to tears in a room full of perplexed students. Of course she looked crazy to them; his death had been a commonplace fact since their days in elementary school. They had no idea what it felt like to be splattered with the still-warm blood of a man who was arguably the most revered president of all time...a man she'd decided too late to try to save.

And then there was the fact that history itself was sometimes completely unrecognizable to her, a universe unknown after so many fractures through time; fractures that she'd often brought on by the force of her own hands. She was working overtime to catch up, putting in countless hours at the library and on her tablet, jamming as much new information into her brain as she could possibly absorb until she dragged herself home for a few disappointingly empty hours tucked away in a cold bed. The cycle repeated on a loop, and the word loop made her miss Rufus and Jiya, which in turn had her missing someone else.

It all came to a screeching halt when she returned from class one day to find her office chair occupied by the solid frame of a gorgeous blue-eyed soldier.

Her laptop bag slid off of her shoulder, just barely catching on her arm before it could crash to the floor. She lowered it the rest of the way with a blubbering noise of surprise.

He spun the chair toward her with a dazzling grin, looking so goddamn cocky at the result of his successful ambush. "What's a guy gotta do to get an appointment around here? I need to see a certain know-it-all professor, but do you think she has a personal assistant? A receptionist? A damn student worker who could actually bother to look up her schedule for me?"

"It's my first semester here...I don't have a lot of clout in this place," she said in a voice that was surely too thin to be her own.

"I can tell," he muttered unenthusiastically, taking a quick scan of his surroundings. "This office is a shoebox. Don't know how you even handle that, considering…"

"The door stays open at all times."

His gaze flickered longingly over the length of her. "Are there exceptions to that rule?"

A _hell yes_ reverberated through her head, but she didn't bother with words. She just slammed that door shut with a bang and took three staggering steps forward until she could collapse into his lap.

She trusted him to catch her. She trusted him to keep her too sufficiently distracted to notice that she'd just sealed the door on a tiny windowless room. She trusted him with every ounce of her healing heart.

Wyatt's arms braced her on either side, unveiling the soft smile she'd come to know as the one that always preceded a kiss which was bound to rock the foundations of the earth. He slipped his fingers into her hair and pulled her in, devouring her in an instant, reclaiming her with an intensity that made two long weeks of living apart feel like no more than two seconds.

With his mouth still on hers, he mumbled out a delirious, "God, I've missed you."

Lucy shifted until she could press her face into his neck, too overcome by the physicality of his presence, suddenly with her right here and right now, to manage anything but a fragmented, "Me - me too."

His hold tensed. "I'm sorry I couldn't be in contact more often, Luce. How have you been adjusting? _Really_ , not just the glossed over text message version, please."

"Really? It's been weird," she answered with a sigh. "Like I'm an alien from another planet weird."

"I hear ya," he said against her ear, "trying to fall in line at Pendleton like I'd just come back from any old assignment…? I'm not sure 'weird' even begins to cover what that felt like."

"Just one last time travel reentry issue to bite us in the ass, right?"

He was chuckling quietly as he nudged her face back up to his. "Let's talk about a different kind of reentry, shall we?"

With just the barest touch of his tongue to her lip, Lucy was parting her mouth and welcoming him in, the tips of her fingers reacquainting themselves with the unfailing bristle of his five o'clock shadow. He groaned as she jostled for a better spot on his lap, and before she even registered the slide of his hands against her thighs, he had her scooped up and redeposited onto the top of her desk.

"I'll have you know," she said a bit breathlessly between kisses, "that this is the premiere sexual fantasy of academic professionals everywhere."

Wyatt's eyes were shining with lively amusement as he filled the space between her legs. "Glad to be of service, ma'am."

His lips descended to hers, and he had her blazer off and crumpled to the floor without breaking stride, one kiss dissolving into two, three, four, before his mouth tumbled lower to mark her collarbone, her shoulder, her -

A knock thudded against the closed door, followed by an uncertain - "Dr. Preston?"

She cupped Wyatt's jaw and pressed her thumb to his mouth, shaking her head sharply. He grinned his approval, his tongue darting out for a wicked taste of her skin.

There was another hasty knock, a defeated sigh, and then the shuffle of a paper being shoved beneath her door. A quick glance sideways confirmed her assumption - a late submission of yesterday's assignment from her mind-numbingly easy 101 class lay creased across the floor.

"It's one thing to get interrupted for the sake of national security," she droned with a roll of her eyes. "Like hell am I taking a time out for the college equivalent of a groveling 'my dog ate my homework' speech."

"These kids have no idea that they're dealing with such a notorious badass, _Dr. Preston_."

She felt a shivering flutter of attraction at the low growl in his voice as he pronounced that title. "Well frankly I've been feeling like more of a headcase than a badass, but - "

"You, Lucy Preston, are not a headcase." He slotted long powerful fingers around her hips and lowered his forehead to hers. "This is not supposed to be an easy transition, okay? Your life shouldn't feel normal because it's _not_. We chased bad guys through time for nearly three years. We took down an evil secret society with a goddamn time machine. You saved the effing world, Lucy, and you went through hell to do it. And let's not forget the fact that you were thrown headfirst into all of that shit without any of the proper psychological training. It would scare the hell out of me if you could just go back to textbooks and term papers without a few setbacks."

Wyatt ducked backwards by an inch, a telltale crease appearing between his eyebrows. "I...I should have been here with you, or pushed harder to come sooner, and - "

"Uh uh," she intervened gently. "That all made sense till the end. You don't get to feel guilty about this. It's your job, Wyatt. That's important too."

Her words were met with a stubborn downward curl of his lip. "It's not more important than you."

"That's never a bad thing to hear," she conceded before pressing forward to leave a gliding kiss on his mouth, "but I wouldn't know you without it, so I can't be too needy now, can I? I owe a lot to that job of yours."

"So would that mean you'd be less than thrilled if I told you I'm on indefinite leave and am considering not going back?"

"You - you're…" No amount of emphatic blinking could jump-start her brain. "What?"

"For maybe the first time in my career, I was brutally honest in all of evals. Honest with _myself_ ," he clarified with a self-deprecating smirk. "I know I need more time to decompress before I can get shipped out somewhere else. And I...I'm sure that I don't want to spend half my life missing you, Lucy. I don't think I can live with that kind of regret. Not anymore."

There was an echo of a starlit night, a brilliant blue pool, the precipice of an uncharted love lying just beyond a few important confessions - _I sorta stopped caring...not anymore_.

"So what…" she said shakily, "we just…drop everything, run away together and - and…"

"Not exactly the practical answer, is it?" He ran his knuckles over her cheek, a wistful smile settling over his features. "Don't get me to wrong, the thought of disappearing together certainly has its charms. I'll never admit it to Rufus or Jiya, but that night they purposely deserted us in the 1800s just to force us back together - no responsibilities, no disruptions - ranks among the best nights of my life."

A flash of giving herself over to him as precious twilight closed over that inn warmed her all over. "Mine too."

His mouth stole over hers, sharing in a reminder of everything they'd regained in those lost hours that the mysteries of time - and the meddling of their presumptuous friends - had granted them.

Lucy threaded her fingers through his hair as they parted, a spike of emotion flying higher and higher inside of her. "Just don't…don't do anything drastic unless you're sure it's what _you_ want, Wyatt. We'll make it work no matter what."

"You're sure about that?" he questioned in a tone too even to be trusted.

"I'm sure that I love you too much to let you make rash decisions based on what you think I need."

That answer propelled him nearer, coming nose-to-nose as he spoke again. "And I love you too much to let you sacrifice your happiness based on what _you_ think _I_ need. I won't put you through that twice."

"Wyatt - "

"Look, I don't know how it'll all end up, okay? Maybe there's still something I'm meant to do with the Army, or maybe it's just time to hang it up. I don't know for sure. What I do know is that it's something I need time to figure out, and I want to figure it out with you."

The fiery persistence in his eyes - his words, his hold, his everything - was undeniable, so she stopped fighting against it; she'd learned the hard way that they figured things out best when they resolved to figure them out together, after all.

"Okay," she whispered, "one thing at a time, right?"

"Right," he confirmed lowly, sincerely, his twitching grin coming across as so endearingly _Wyatt_ through and through. "Now that's enough talking. We're not leaving this room until you can check off that sex-on-a-desk fantasy of yours, so quit stalling and let's get to it already."

Lucy clutched his face in her hands and found herself celebrating the breathlessness - a loss of control, the sweet and thorough abandon - that only came through the inevitability of his hands, his mouth, his body filling hers.

He was her foregone conclusion, the one miraculous counterpoint that had single-handedly restored her belief in such a tenuous thing as fate.


End file.
